hey looked at scores from the Stanford 9 test. They showed that students who moved from a low-achieving class to a high-achieving class improved by 9 percent more than if they had stayed in the low-achieving class. The researchers predicted that in middle school, students could improve by as much as 50 percent by switching to a high-achieving class. The students who are performing well motivate the lower-achieving students who interact with them, and teachers give more challenging assignments to higher achieving students, pushing them even more. Mostly we hear about the negative effects of peer pressure. It is peer pressure that is often responsible for adolescents beginning to smoke, drink beer, taking illegal drugs, cut classes, and commit acts of vandalism (Rafenstein, 2002). Young people want to feel included, they want to be part of what everyone else is doing, and it is easy for them to be persuaded to take that first drink, smoke that first cigarette, smoke that first joint; but we all know that the first one is never the last one, and peer pressure is what sustains these habits in young people. They do not want to be thought of as cowardly, they want to be part of the ôinö crowd, and to impress members of the opposite sex. A desire to be accepted
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